Products made from or incorporating one or more plastics are a part of almost any work place or home environment. Generally, the plastics that are used to create these products are formed from virgin plastic materials. That is, the plastics are produced from petroleum or natural gas and are not made from existing plastic materials. Once the products have outlived their useful lives, they are generally sent to waste disposal or a recycling plant.
Recycling plastic has a variety of benefits over creating virgin plastic from petroleum. Generally, less energy is required to manufacture an article from recycled plastic materials derived from post-consumer and post-industrial waste materials and plastic scrap (collectively referred to in this specification as “waste plastic material”), than from the comparable virgin plastic. Recycling plastic materials obviates the need for disposing of the plastic materials or product. Further, less of the earth's limited resources, such as petroleum and natural gas, are used to form virgin plastic materials.
When plastic materials are sent to be recycled, the feed streams rich in plastics may be separated into multiple product and byproduct streams. Generally, the recycling processes can be applied to a variety of plastics-rich streams derived from post-industrial and post-consumer sources. These streams may include, for example, plastics from office automation equipment (printers, computers, copiers, etc.), white goods (refrigerators, washing machines, etc.), consumer electronics (televisions, video cassette recorders, stereos, etc.), automotive shredder residue (the mixed materials remaining after most of the metals have been sorted from shredded automobiles and other metal-rich products “shredded” by metal recyclers), packaging waste, household waste, building waste and industrial molding and extrusion scrap.
Different types of plastic parts are often processed into shredded plastic-rich streams. The variety of parts can vary from a single type of part from a single manufacturer up to multiple families of part types. Many variations exist, depending on at least the nature of the shredding operation. Plastics from more than one source of durable goods may be included in the mix of materials fed to a plastics recycling plant. This means that a very broad range of plastics may be included in the feed mixture. Some of the prevalent polymer types in the waste plastic materials derived from the recycling of end-of-life durable goods are acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene (ABS), high impact polystyrene (HIPS), polypropylene (PP), polyethylene (PE) and polycarbonate (PC), but other polymers may also be present.
Recycled plastic materials, however, can sometimes suffer from unwanted odors, difficulties with melt processing, foaming of the extrudate, and poor surface appearance. The poor surface appearance may be manifested by splay, silver streaking, surface roughness or other cosmetic problems. End users require products meeting their requirements for odor, volatiles emissions and surface appearance, but market and legislative forces are encouraging manufacturers to incorporate post-consumer plastics into their products. In order to satisfy these requirements, it is important to identify and implement appropriate methods to avoid unwanted odors, avoid difficulties with melt processing, avoid foaming of the extrudate, and improve surface appearance.